Kofax Capture Enterprise Implementation Considerations

Kofax Capture Enterprise Implementation Considerations White Paper “Business is a March 2008 Conversation” – David Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual By Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger Introduction Optimized for enterprise-wide usage, Kofax Capture is a modular application. Right out of the box it can support the needs of a small or medium sized business or a single department, or it can expand to meet the needs of a high- volume enterprise. Kofax Capture’s flexible design makes it easy to incorporate customizations that perform highly specialized tasks to accommodate unique enterprise requirements. The Kofax Capture platform offers exceptional compatibility with scanners and other capture devices, content and document management systems, workflow applications, and databases. No matter what hardware or enterprise applications are implemented, Kofax Capture ensures consistent capture, indexing, and validation of the information needed by an enterprise. As the capture industry leader, Kofax has the experience and expertise to address the needs of any size enterprise. To do so, Kofax adheres to the following precepts: • Leverage Industry Standards to include: - High availability - Standard platforms and communication protocols - Minimal operator training • Offer customization enhancements such as: - Sample custom modules - Fully commented and self-documented source code examples - Extensive API libraries • Provide business process flexibility • Optimize capture and data extraction White Paper – Kofax Capture Enterprise Implementation Considerations Page 1 Enterprise Implementation An expanding business provides opportunities for the entire enterprise to grow, including the IT department. When managing this growth, the IT department, and in particular IT management, should consider the following factors: • Deployability – Is the new system easy to deploy, even to remote locations? • Compatibility – Is the new system compatible with existing infrastructure and industry standards? • Stability – Does the new system have high availability features and follow industry standards to ensure stability? • Customizability – Can the new system be customized to meet specialized or changing business requirements? • Scalability – Can the new system be easily scaled to meet business demands? • Maintainability – Is maintenance easy to perform using existing IT staff knowledge? • Security – Can IT staff members easily perform system security and control user accounts? • Supportability – Is it easy to provide user support? • Affordability – Is the new system affordable and can it provide a good return on investment? Kofax Capture provides a definitive, state of the art solution in all these areas. The following sections of this white paper address each of the questions on the prior page and explain how the Kofax Capture solution aids an enterprise’s IT department in implementing a new capture system. White Paper – Kofax Capture Enterprise Implementation Considerations Page 2 Deployability Is the new system easy to deploy, even to remote locations? The ease in which a new system is deployed and integrated into an existing system is important to the IT manager. The following are deployment points the manager should consider: • Ease of Installation – Does the new hardware and software follow industry standards to easily integrate into an existing system? • Platform Options – Is the system flexible with regard to operational platforms, and can run on hardware and operating systems already familiar to the IT staff? • Development/Test System – If desired, can a development or test system be implemented to allow procedural validation prior to full implementation? • Central Administration – In a geographically distributed system, is central administration available; thus eliminating the need for local or traveling administrators? Enterprise class organizations benefit greatly from simple, streamlined installation options. Kofax Capture has been designed to be highly flexible, while minimizing the time and effort required for large, distributed systems to become fully operational. When there are hundreds, or possibly thousands, of workstations to configure, a few minutes saved per station translates into big savings. If the IT staff can manage the installations from headquarters instead of traveling from site to site, the savings increase dramatically. Therefore, a variety of installation options have been provided. Three of the options are automatic. The fourth option is a manual installation. Installation Options Kofax Capture offers both automatic installation options and a manual option. When installing and configuring multiple workstations, the automatic installation methods offer the best combination of speed and flexibility. Automatic installations leverage the extensive knowledge and experience of the IT staff. This allows a typical user to perform an installation without central site assistance. Automatic installation methods available are: • Kofax Capture Deployment Utility • Silent Installation Method • Non-Interactive Installation Method White Paper – Kofax Capture Enterprise Implementation Considerations Page 3 Kofax Capture Deployment Utility By using a 3rd party application to create a “ghost” image of a Kofax Capture workstation it is possible to take the image, install it on a computer, and create a new workstation. However, as with most systems, every Kofax Capture remote installation has unique settings, such as station name and ID. The IT staff can preset these unique settings on the target computer at a central facility. This amounts to a centralized “assembly line” so that many computers can be efficiently configured. The configured computer can be shipped to the remote site, where it arrives ready to go. This option is most applicable to installing many small sites where network connectivity is poor or nonexistent. Silent Installations The Silent Installation feature of Kofax Capture is often used as part of a larger, customized deployment package (frequently with a customized user interface) to install other software in addition to Kofax Capture. With the Silent Installation method, settings are determined by the IT staff and specified in an initialization file (which can also launch 3rd party installation applications). The benefit of Silent Installation is the IT staff has complete control of the installation. The installing user is not presented with prompts or progress messages, thus ensuring a standard IT configured installation. Non-interactive Installations The Non-interactive Installation is similar to the Silent Installation. The installing user still does not have to respond to prompts, but this time progress and status information is displayed. The Non-interactive Installation method allows the installing user to monitor the progress of the installation and report any necessary information to IT. Manual Installation When performing a Manual Installation, the installing user responds to prompts, and directs the installation application as needed. This method works best for installations where users can be relied upon to make appropriate decisions during the installation process or to install servers with unique setup requirements. Flexible Platforms Kofax Capture can be deployed and made accessible to users via a variety of methods. This flexibility aids the IT manager in aligning the new hardware and software with the current installation, while providing users with the access they need to do their jobs. White Paper – Kofax Capture Enterprise Implementation Considerations Page 4 Kofax Capture takes advantage of a 3-tier architecture: communications, applications, and storage. The communications tier may be IIS (Windows) or WebSphere (UNIX/J2EE) based. The applications tier runs on Windows, while the Storage tier may run on Windows, UNIX, Linux, or AIX. Web Access Kofax Capture Network Server allows remote sites to be fully integrated participants in the Kofax Capture workflow. Batches and batch data are seamlessly transferred between the central and remote sites using the Internet. In order to provide maximum flexibility and convenience, either WebSphere (on UNIX/J2EE or Windows) or IIS (on Windows) can support Web server functions. Both of these Web servers enjoy broad industry acceptance and can be used to mediate the transfer of information between central and remote sites. Application Environments As a Windows based application, the entire suite of Kofax Capture applications runs on the most popular, professional grade, versions of the Windows operating system. As new releases of Windows are made available, Kofax performs extensive testing to ensure Kofax Capture is certified to run on these new releases. Kofax Capture also supports remote application operation through Citrix and Terminal Services. Many organizations, particularly at the enterprise level, have a large number of existing clients with a variety of configurations. Citrix and Terminal Services support makes it possible to run Kofax Capture modules from any of these clients. Databases To accommodate business needs, Kofax Capture also offers database flexibility. The industry standard database engine (MSDE) is included with Kofax Capture.